


Three Paths to Peace

by deborah_judge



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dubious Consent, F/M, Stockholm Syndrome, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:10:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deborah_judge/pseuds/deborah_judge
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alternate universe: What if Kara had completely fallen in love with Leoben while imprisoned on New Caprica?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Paths to Peace

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by bsg_epics discussion on New Caprica and AUs. Many thanks to rivendellrose for betareading.
> 
> This is not consistent with any of my other stories. Also, it is a less happy fic than it might appear at first.

Part 1

 

Kara remembered the day it happened. She had been standing at the window, watching the light of the sun play over her home. Leoben and Kacey were playing on the floor, they were smiling and laughing, and there was nowhere else in the universe that Kara could or had to be. She was happy.

*

The next day she dragged her homemade idols out from where she had hidden them in the sofa and put them by the side of her plate before dinner. When Leoben said his grace, Kara said hers. Kacey looked from one to the other and gurgled. Kara took her hand, and then she took Leoben's. She didn't say anything. There was too much to say. After dinner she cleared the dishes and went to the sink to wash them. She felt Leoben behind her, silent, watching. Then he put one hand on her bare shoulder. He left it there for a long moment, like a question. Her hands were in the sink, covered with soap, and she didn't move.

Kara slept on the sofa that night, as she usually did, but when she awoke all the bars on the windows and doors were gone.

*

Kacey liked to grab Kara's hands, to climb into her arms and make her laugh. She was the joy of Kara's life, but Kara had always known that the story she had let herself believe about her wasn't true.

"She's not ours," Kara asked Leoben. "Is she?"

"Isn't she?" Leoben answered. She could hear the question he was asking, _don't you love her?_ but that wasn't the only question that mattered.

"Is her mother still alive?" Kara asked. "If she is, then we should give her back."

"The door's open," Leoben said.

"It's okay," Kara said, looking down, afraid of the words she was saying. "We can have a child of our own."

*

Finding Julia was less difficult than Kara had expected, and Kacey's mother was too grateful to ask too many questions. Kara thought for a moment about Sam, then stopped thinking about him and went back to the place that she had started to think of as home.

Leoben was waiting in the living room and jumped up when he heard her. In less than a moment she had her arms around his waist and her face buried in his chest. "You came back," he breathed.

 _It's because I was happy here_ she almost said, or almost gave him the other words he'd been wanting, but it was too much and too scary and she wasn't used to feeling like this when she wasn't flying. He was breathing in her hair and his hands were gentle on her back and she felt herself sobbing or laughing, she couldn't be sure, but he was there and holding her and even with all the doors unlocked this was where she wanted to be. "I want you to make love to me," she said, because she needed to be clear, and she clutched him hard as he lifted her up and carried her to his room.

They scarcely got out of bed for the next three days. There didn't seem to be anyplace more important to be, and Kara found Leoben's body endlessly fascinating. She liked to touch him everywhere, to lick him, to make him moan. When they were eating oranges in bed Kara took the kitchen knife and traced soft patterns along Leoben's chest. She drew a tiny drop of blood, then tasted it. It tasted human, just like his sweat and his come.

One afternoon as they lay sprawled together, her hand between his thighs and his on her breast, she asked him what he'd seen about her.

"I saw this," he said, stroking down her spine with his free hand lightly enough to just make her shiver. "I saw you loving me. A child." He glanced one hand over Kara's belly.

"And then what?" she asked. "Tell me everything you saw."

"I saw peace," he said. "Between Cylons and humans. You made it happen."

Which meant there wasn't peace now. Kara had known that, vaguely, had blocked it out while holding on to her tiny sliver of happiness in this robot's arms. "How did I do it?" she asked. "Do you know?"

"You became what you truly are," he said. "Something beyond what I can even imagine."

It sounded like something her mother would say, usually before a beating. _You need to suffer to become everything you are._ "I don't want that," she said.

"It doesn't have to be awful," he said, caressing her. "There's another way." His light touch on her body felt like fire. "Please," she murmured, because he liked when she begged. When he filled her she burned for him. Every time they made love it felt deeper, like she was opening more and more of herself to him. Each layer of surrender stripped off another part of what she had been.

The next day she killed him for the sixth time. She wasn't even sure why she did it, maybe it was something from a part of her that she was trying to destroy bubbling up for one last strike. She stabbed him in the back with one of the knives that he had left lying around so freely, then when he fell she caught him and held him as he died, watched him forgive her as if he knew something that she had yet to understand. Then she went to the window and looked out. Smoke rose in the distance. Somewhere her people were fighting. There wasn't peace. Something had gone terribly wrong.

Part 2

The Six called Caprica had never wanted this, she explained to Kara. Boomer, who had once been Kara's friend, nodded in agreement. They had come to New Caprica to live together with the humans, to love them and share their lives with them.

"Yeah," said Kara, bitterly. "I know what that looks like." Kara was leading the resistance now, was co-ordinating the bombings and sabotage. She'd been the resistance leader for months, ever since she had walked out of her comfortable prison, and anyone who said her visible pregnancy was a reason for her to stay out of danger was going to get a lip too bloody to say it again. "We didn't invite you here, whatever the reason."

"Never mind that," said the Six. "We'll join you. The Sixes, the Sharons and the Twos will fight alongside the resistance."

"Not the Twos," Kara said. "I mean, they can fight on the ground, I don't care, I just don't want to look at him." He'd probably just frakking forgive her again. She doesn't know how many Twos she'd killed in her months leading the resistance, doesn't want to think about it. But she'd killed Sixes and Eights as well, and here Caprica and Sharon were negotiating with her.

"I completely understand," said Boomer. She gestured at the unmistakable swell in Kara's abdomen. "Is that..."

"It's your half-toaster niece, yeah." Kara assumed it was a daughter she was carrying, otherwise Leoben would've seduced her with a boy instead of Kacey. Then again, maybe she was giving his manipulations too much credit. "Does it matter?"

"It matters," said Caprica. "It matters a lot. We knew about Athena's child, but we had thought there could be only one. Now there's hope for all of us."

*

At night Kara lay on the frozen ground, buried under branches so the secret police wouldn't find her. She felt her daughter's heartbeat. She wanted this child, loved her already, had nearly punched Cottle through the face when he'd suggested that there were ways of ending a pregnancy she didn't want. "Did he rape you?" Sam had asked, and Kara had just snarled at her husband to mind his own frakking business. It felt like a stupid question. She had stepped willingly, eagerly into Leoben's embrace, and had even gone back to him when he freed her, but she hadn't asked to be kidnapped in the first place, or for their world to be occupied, and none of the Colonials had asked for their worlds to be destroyed. There was so much wrong that had been done here, and so very little of it was hers.

In the distance a bomb went off, blowing up one of the last remaining administration compound buildings. Kara had set that bomb, together with a Six. At first she had wondered why the Sixes and Eights hadn't simply rebelled on their own, but then it became clear: they didn't know how. Oh, they knew how to fight, but they had always taken orders in battle from their oldest brother. They didn't know how to organize a battle themselves. That Kara could teach them.

When Kara finally slept she dreamed of Leoben. His body was sweet on hers and she pushed up to him as if she could lose herself completely in the pleasure he gave her with each gentle thrust. She woke up shivering, and even just the dream of Leoben's arms around her gave her strength to face the cold. It didn't matter that she dreamed of him. It didn't matter that she loved him. None of that mattered. He had manipulated her into it, with the home and the daughter that were both never hers. It didn't matter. None of it did.

Her people were fighting. She was going to fight with them. She had freed herself, and it was time for all of them to be free.

Part 3

It wasn't until months later, after the Threes had given the surrender on behalf of the occupying Cylons, that Kara found out what her Leoben had been doing all the time she had been fighting. He hadn't been in battle, not for one side and not for the other. Instead, he had been speaking to the Cylons, speaking in parables.

 _Once there was a man who wanted to love, and there was a woman that he loved more than life. He captured her, held her captive, gave her gifts and spoke words that he knew she would want to hear. Eventually she gave him what he wanted, she said "I love you, I love you."_

 _Now tell me, is this a story about love?_

Kara hated the thought of being a living parable. It disgusted her. Her daughter wasn't a parable, she was a child. Or would be when she was born, which looked to be any minute. But there was another story, another parable, only slightly different from the first:

 _Once there was a man who wanted to love, and there was no living woman that he loved. So he formed one, from wire and blood. He programmed her, taught her to be pleased by him and say the words that he wanted to hear, "I love you, I love you."_

 _Now tell me, is this a story about love?_

And it was just storytelling, but it mattered. Maybe as much as her bombs, or even as much as the way the _Galactica_ had suddenly and inexplicably reappeared from nowhere. And maybe her pregnancy mattered too, the way she showed in her body the possibility that humans and Cylons could make life together. Between all of this there were Cylons who kept joining the rebellion, Threes and Fours and even the very occasional One or Five, Cylons who would wander into her camp and say, no, forcing ourselves on humans isn't the answer. Eventually the occupiers were simply outnumbered.

The terms of the surrender, as delivered by D'Anna Biers to Laura Roslin, were as follows: All occupying forces would withdraw from New Caprica. Cylons who wished to stay could stay, but they would be under human rule. Laura herself would continue the search for Earth, and the Cylons would provide her with any resources necessary. Also, there was the matter of punishment. Execution would be pointless, so it would have to be exile, for the specific Cylons who committed particular crimes. Among them was the Leoben who had kidnapped Kara Thrace.

She could've spoken up for him. She could've said that he didn't kidnap her, she went willingly, but that wasn't true. Or she could have said that he didn't rape her, hadn't impregnated her by force, but then no one had said that he had. So she said nothing, and once the agreement was made she went to see him in prison.

He smiled when he saw her, that godsdamned open crazy smile, and she forgot anything she had thought about what she was going to say. And then he kissed her and she forgot about anything else at all. His hands were everywhere, and then his mouth, and he whispered "I love you" against her neck. She gasped, and all she could think about was wanting him.

"Gods," she said. "I don't want you to go."

He pulled back. "Then ask your President to pardon me," he said.

Kara paused, trying to catch her breath. "You said I would make peace," she said. "Humans and Cylons were fighting. Now they're not. Is this what peace looks like?"

"What do you think, Kara?" Leoben responded.

"I think you kidnapped me."

"Yes," he said.

"And I think you made me love you."

"Did I?" he asked, and Kara realized the number of things that she had just admitted. There was no harm in saying them, though, not any more.

She put his hands on her, one on her chest and one on her belly. "I love you," she said. "We're going to have a child. And I don't forgive you, maybe not yet and maybe not ever." And yes, maybe this is what peace looks like. Then she undressed so that he could feel his child in her, and so that they could be close together.

The next day Kara put in an application to the President to grant a pardon to Leoben Conoy, on the grounds of unspecified aid given the resistance. "I hope you know what you're doing, Captain," Laura said as she signed it. She didn't, though. She had no frakking clue. At least she didn't let him move in with her. There was too much she had to figure out first. She wasn't even divorced yet.

Four days later Kara went into labour. Three days after that she took her daughter outside to look at the stars. Earth was near one of them, and they'd find it soon. But in any case she had this child with her, this crazy miracle of a human-Cylon child that Kara knew she'd always be able to love. This gift of love that Leoben had somehow given her, along with his manipulations and parables and prophecy. She wasn't quite grateful, but despite everything she was going to find a way to be happy.


End file.
